Update: On May 15, 2012, officials filed 17 additional charges of cruelty to animals against Susan Marino, based on evidence gathered as a result of PETA's undercover investigation. Animals like Tuxie—the cat whose gaping neck and head wound Marino picked at and who, PETA learned, died last fall after suffering terribly for many months—will finally be granted a chance at justice. Marino now faces a total of 22 cruelty charges as well as a drug-related charge.

The Delaware County, New York, District Attorney's Office has filed charges of cruelty to animals as well as a drug-related charge against Susan Marino, the woman responsible for the horrific suffering of hundreds of animals at Angel's Gate, Inc., which she founded, operates, and dares to call "a hospice and rehabilitation center."

PETA's investigation of this hellhole exposed the daily neglect and terrible suffering of disabled, elderly, and ailing animals, many of whom had been shipped to Marino by well-meaning but severely uninformed individuals and agencies, including the New York Center for Animal Care and Control (NYCACC), which doomed Malcolm the Chihuahua and hundreds of other animals to die slowly at Angel's Gate through its "New Hope" program.  

PETA had provided the District Attorney with the evidence that our investigator gathered while volunteering at Angel's Gate. Our investigator saw Marino allow animals to suffer, sometimes for weeks, from treatable conditions as well as terminal illnesses without providing veterinary care, medication, or pain relief. Paralyzed animals dragged themselves until they developed bloody ulcers. Animals developed urine scald after being left in soaked diapers for up to two days. Dehydrated animals were denied water, and others were forced to stay outside in freezing temperatures. The bodies of dead animals were left among those of the living for days.

While Marino has been charged, the nightmare is not over for the animals at Angel's Gate, as they have not yet been seized. Please help us ensure their welfare and the safety of future victims by joining us in urging the New York State Attorney General to revoke Angel's Gate's nonprofit status and ensure that the animals are removed from Marino's custody. Please click here to send a letter to the Attorney General, and please, when your animal companions become elderly or ill, let them live out their final days with dignity in the comfort of their own homes, surrounded by their families, not at the mercy of a conniving stranger.

As viewers of the popular reality shows about hoarders can likely confirm, peering inside the homes of people who suffer from the psychological compulsion to collect things has a certain morbid attraction, until you realize the toll it takes on the families of the afflicted—and it's far worse when the "things" they're collecting are living, feeling beings.

Animal hoarding is a serious and growing problem, with hoarders taking on far more animals than they can properly care for. The number of reported cases is on the rise, leading the Animal Legal Defense Fund to call hoarding "the number one animal cruelty crisis facing companion animals in communities throughout the country."

Chillingly, the so-called "no kill" movement propagated by the likes of Nathan Winograd offers cover for these disturbed individuals, many of whom claim to be "rescuing" the animals and attempt to justify the suffering that they cause as a matter of principle. A Los Angeles Times blog post reported that a quarter of the roughly 6,000 new hoarding cases reported each year in the U.S. consist of supposed "shelters" and "rescues."

Animals kept in crates at a “no kill” shelter.

Even when rescues and animal shelters aren't hoarding animals themselves—like the self-proclaimed animal "hospice and rehabilitation center" called "Angel's Gate" and the now-defunct "Sacred Vision Animal Sanctuary"—they all too often give away animals to anyone who will take them, including hoarders, to manipulate their euthanasia statistics, regardless of what tragedy that translates into for the animals.

Here are just a few recent examples:

• When a "rescue" in Georgia shut down, the people who arrived to retrieve the remaining animals discovered the bones of dozens of animals on the property, including the remains of dogs who had been put into crates to die.
• Two operators of a "no kill" rescue group were arrested in Tennessee when authorities found more than 120 dogs and one cat in a U-Haul truck bound for Virginia, without any air supply or circulation. The animals had been removed from California animal shelters and were crammed four or five to a cage. One dog was dead, and the others were found wallowing in urine and feces, without access to water or even a clean place to stand.
• A family abandoned their dog on someone's doorstep in a Michigan town where the local animal shelter requires payment of a "surrender fee" to accept animals, as many shelters have begun charging in an attempt to keep animals out and their euthanasia statistics low.
• When animal-control officials searched a "no kill" cat shelter in Indiana, they found 34 cats living in filth and squalor. Four of the cats subsequently died, and many others were sick
• The operators of an animal rescue in New York were charged with 54 misdemeanor counts after 68 dogs and cats were removed from their "unsanitary" home.
• One New Jersey rescue claimed to be "saving" puppies from animal shelters in the South, but it was actually selling them for profit in the North.

The failure of "no kill" animal shelters and rescues to address the problems facing homeless animals—and often making matters worse—is why PETA remains focused on the solution to the animal overpopulation crisis: creating a no-birth nation. PETA's fleet of mobile low-cost veterinary clinics (responsible for sterilizing 10,564 animals in 2011 and almost 80,000 so far since 2001!) and our advocacy of strong spay-and-neuter legislation are key to keeping animals out of the hands of hoarders and other people who don't have their best interests at heart and guaranteeing that every animal born has a loving, permanent home awaiting him or her.

How You Can Help Animals in Shelters

Volunteer to help your local animal shelter screen potential adopters and placement partners. Animal shelters can contact PETA for placement-partner applications and agreements. Please also be sure to spay or neuter your animal companions and encourage others to do the same—it's the best way to end the need for animal rescues altogether!

PETA has learned that Casey, a young, paralyzed St. Bernard, died recently at Angel's Gate, reportedly after suffering from a long-term urinary tract infection. Casey spent most of her short life at the mercy of Susan Marino—the founder and operator of the hellhole, which continues to keep hundreds of ailing and disabled animals in conditions that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. Marino faces criminal cruelty-to-animals and other charges; her next court date is March 20. We will be there.

Casey was among the animals whose systemic neglect we documented in our undercover investigation of the self-proclaimed "hospice and rehabilitation center." Our investigator routinely found Casey covered with her own waste and confined to a filthy crib, often without access to water. Routinely spending hours caked with excrement scalded the paraplegic Casey's skin around her hindquarters and genitals. We learned that in recent months, Casey was mostly kept on a mattress surrounded by baby gates, where she often lay in her own waste; that at some point, she had bloody urine; and that Marino often bemoaned Casey's "stink."

Casey as a pup, in September 2010.

Casey was not alone in her suffering. Several of the animals whose suffering we caught on video have since died, including Tucker, a sweet little beagle-hound mix with hydrocephalus who allegedly drowned a few weeks ago, evidently after being left unsupervised. Our investigation exposed the following:

• Paralyzed animals had bleeding ulcers from being forced to drag themselves around.
• Animals suffered from urine scald from being left in waste-filled diapers for up to two days.
• Animals were left outside in freezing temperatures or confined to bathrooms and bathtubs.
• Animals suffered from treatable conditions—including open wounds and infections so severe that one dog's rotted jaw snapped in half—but were deprived of veterinary care.
• Animals endured pain or seizures but were denied medications.
• Dead animals' bodies were left out for days among live animals.
• Animals were fed rancid, raw meat and left without access to water.

The Delaware County, New York, District Attorney's Office filed charges of cruelty to animals and criminal possession of a controlled substance against Marino, but hundreds of animals still remain in Marino's custody.

How You Can Help These Animals

Please urge the New York Attorney General's Office to dissolve Angel's Gate as a nonprofit corporation and make sure that Marino's victims are immediately seized and helped.

Feces littered the floor and black mold covered the walls of a house that held 34 cats—many of them hungry, thirsty, and sick. Some animals were hunched over in tiny cages, covered with their own excrement. Even the beds of the humans who lived there had feces on them. Dogs and chickens were found outdoors without any food.

Sounds like something you might see on Confessions: Animal Hoarding, right? Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) this hellhole—raided a few days before Christmas by Harrison County, Indiana, animal control—billed itself as a no-kill animal shelter called "Frisky Felines Foundation."

Multiple similar cases have made headlines in just the past few months. In September, the SPCA of Upstate New York seized 68 animals from Peaceable Kingdom Animal Rescue, a no-kill facility. The animals were emaciated, dehydrated, and suffering from mange, eye infections, dental problems, diarrhea, and other health issues that appeared to have gone untreated.

PETA's investigation of Angel's Gate, Inc., a self-proclaimed animal "hospice and rehabilitation center" in Delhi, New York, revealed that paralyzed animals dragged themselves until they developed bleeding sores, animals were denied veterinary care (one dog suffered with an infected, rotten, broken jaw), crowded conditions were so stressful that fights erupted daily, and animals were kept in urine-soaked diapers for days at a time, resulting in urine scald. Angel's Gate promised unsuspecting people that "special needs animals" would "live out their days in peace, dignity and love." Although its founder and operator, Susan Marino, now faces charges of cruelty to animals and criminal possession of a controlled substance, hundreds of animals remain in her hands—a situation that you can help change.

This elderly, weak Chihuahua—given to Marino by an animal
shelter—suffered terribly without veterinary treatment for about two
weeks before dying.

The line between hoarders and no-kill facilities has always been a blurry one. After all, many no-kill animal shelters' modus operandi is to avoid euthanasia at all costs, even if it means caging animals for the rest of their miserable lives. But thankfully, awareness is growing about the many ways in which the no-kill philosophy promoted by Nathan Winograd and others fails animals. Writer Phyllis M. Daugherty explained the situation brilliantly in her recent Opposing Views column:

We all would love to see an end of the need to euthanize behaviorally and physically sound discarded pets, but there are just not enough homes to adopt them. Humane euthanasia to relieve shelter overcrowding cannot be stopped just because it is uncomfortable or unpopular without subjecting thousands of innocent animals to suffering in packed kennels plagued with disease and injury or death from attacks and fighting.

We must not allow them to be "rescued" by those who are unprepared for or unable to provide for all their needs. We also cannot, in the name of "No Kill" and in our rush to feel good about having them "leave the shelter," release them into the hands of someone who can sadistically watch them suffer and/or starve to death, often with food available on the premises.

How You Can Keep Animals Safe From Hoarders

The abundance of homeless animals in nearly every community makes it easy for hoarders masquerading as rescue facilities and sanctuaries to acquire their victims. Spaying or neutering even one dog or cat can prevent thousands of additional animals from being born only to end up homeless, hoarded, or worse. It's also crucial to support open-door animal shelters, which accept every animal in need and never keep animals stored away like surplus merchandise.

Angel's Gate, Inc., is a self-proclaimed animal "hospice and rehabilitation center" that promises guardians that "special needs animals" will "live out their days in peace, dignity and love." But a new PETA undercover investigation has revealed shocking, systemic, and sometimes fatal neglect of the animals taken to this deceptive Delhi, N.Y., facility. PETA has submitted a formal complaint to the local prosecutor and is calling for a criminal investigation and immediate veterinary assessment of all animals still languishing at Angel's Gate. PETA has also turned over evidence to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and to various New York State regulatory officials.

 
PETA's investigation found that Angel's Gate executive director Susan Marino kept animals in crowded, inhumane conditions, leading to fights over space and food and injuries that were then left untreated. Animals were denied veterinary care and medications for pain, seizures, tumors, infections, and open wounds; one such animal, Malcolm, was left to deteriorate for roughly two weeks, until he could not stand, walk, or eat, before he finally died. Despite the availability of wheelchair carts, Marino forced paraplegic dogs to drag themselves around. Animals who needed to have their bladders expressed were placed in diapers until they urinated on themselves, resulting in urine scald. A miniature horse at the facility, Mimi, died after she was denied treatment for severe respiratory distress. Months after Mimi's death, Marino is still soliciting donations for the horse's care on her website.

Please take a moment to e-mail Delaware County District Attorney Richard Northrup Jr. and politely ask him to investigate Angel's Gate, get immediate help for the animals there, and file suitable cruelty-to-animals and other criminal charges against Susan Marino.

And please promise your animal companions today that you will always be there for them, especially in the most difficult times of their lives. They depend on us to prevent and alleviate their suffering; when veterinary care cannot provide that, please give them the relief and dignity of humane euthanasia. Shipping animals off to a facility in the hope that they will die there peacefully fails them, as this investigation clearly shows.

Written by Paula Moore